According to a report from the Albany Times-Union, a woman born in 1984 sued Bellevue Maternity Hospital for severe brain damage she suffered during birth.

The medical malpractice lawsuit claimed that Tiffany Busone, 24, suffered cerebral palsy because of improper resuscitation after she was oxygen-deprived in the delivery room.

Mentally, Busone has above-average intelligence - but physically, she suffers. She uses a wheelchair and doesn’t have fully developed motor skills.

The law firm representing Busone has called this settlement the largest personal injury verdict in upstate New York.

The answer is yes - and one young girl and her family have experienced it first hand.

According to ABC News, six of every 10 babies born acquires jaundice in the first few weeks of life - so when Lexi Haas showed symptoms at just three days old, her doctor was not worried.

Now, seven years later, Lexi is having surgeries to combat a movement disorder from which she now suffers - as a result of jaundice when she was an infant.

The brain injury condition Lexi has could have been avoided with one simple test - but she never received that test, said her mother Susan.

Now, at age seven, Lexi’s mental functions are completely in tact, but for her, voluntary physical movement is an impossibility.

Her mother estimates that medical costs throughout Lexi’s life will cost upwards of $25 million. The family can hire an injury lawyer and seek damages from the hospital or doctor that might be responsible for Lexi’s condition.

According to an investigation by the Hearst Corporation, they found that about 200,000 deaths are because of medical mistakes and mishaps each year.

The report is titled “Death by Mistake,” and it shows preventable medical errors and infections spread throughout hospitals may be responsible for thousands of deaths annually.

Back in 1999 when the federal government came out with their report about medical malpractice called “To Err is Human,” many hoped it would spur some changes and improvements in the world of medicine. Unfortunately, Hearst’s new report shows that hospitals, medical organizations and the federal government have done little to change safety/health practices.

According to CBS News, here are seven factors that cause or contribute to the thousands of medical deaths yearly:

• Operating on the wrong organ or wrong side of the body
• Improper medication (wrong doses, patients given meds they’re allergic to)
• Miscommunication or no communication between doctors and patients  before surgery
• Bad documentation
• Sleep-deprived doctors/surgeons
• Illegible handwriting
• Low nurse-to-patient ratios

Patients can help doctors and hospitals improve medical malpractice statistics by opening a higher level of communication with their care providers. Doctors and surgeons can help by talking to patients before they are sedated for procedures - to make sure everyone is on the same page.

Doctors and hospitals don’t want to face injury lawsuits, and no one wants to see the statistics of 200,000 deaths by medical mistake. If you’re a doctor or a patient, take a little extra time and care, and see what you can do to help!

In Winter Park, Fla., a family has pressed charges against a dentist for allegedly dropping dental tools down the throat of their 90-year-old family member - twice.

According to a Chicago Tribune article, Dr. Wesley Meyers dropped an implant screwdriver down Charles Geal Jr.’s throat in 2006 and a mini-wrench in 2007. After several invasive surgeries to remove the tools, Geal never fully recovered. He died in 2007, but there is no known direct correlation with the dental mishaps.

Meyers was fined by the state for his mistakes, and was found negligent - but now the family is seeking more compensation. To drop anything down a patient’s throat beyond the point of recovering it is awful - but to do it twice is even worse.

An injury lawyer is representing Geal’s family in this personal injury lawsuit.

According to a report from the Miami Herald, colonoscopies performed in Chattanooga, Tenn. may have resulted in the patients being exposed to HIV.

The patients are currently awaiting a response from the VA to see if they will be receiving compensation for their damages in this medical malpractice situation.

Unfortunately, the responsible parties are not offering to pay out the damages they caused in this lawsuit, though this is a clear example of medical malpractice in action. The lawsuit has resulted in congressional hearings and new patient safety standards from the VA, but the organization claims there is no way to trace the evidence back to the VA.

The victims exposed to HIV are represented by  a personal injury attorney in the case.

President Barak Obama returned to his home city this week - Chicago, Ill. - to address the American Medical Association on the topic of health care reform.

Obama wants to let doctors do what they are trained to do and be doctors - not bureaucratic businessmen that are constantly thinking about money making and worried about lawsuits.

According to a CNN report, Obama said the current health care model focuses more on the quantity of heath care patients received rather than the quality of care. Obama said to his audience of physicians that this model “pushes you, the doctor, to see more and more patients even if you can’t spend much time with each; and gives you every incentive to order that extra MRI or EKG, even if it’s not truly necessary.  It is a model that has taken the pursuit of medicine from a profession — a calling — to a business.”

According to Obama’s speech, the extra tests and scans called for by doctors are often unnecessary precautions, used by doctors to lessen the risk of a medical malpractice lawsuit.

If the system is reformed in the manner that Obama is proposing, there would be protection for doctors, allowing them to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.

Obama did say he does not want to put a cap on medical malpractice lawsuits, but he wants to make sure that patient safety comes first and allow doctors to be the “healers” they are meant to be.

So what does that mean for the health care system of America? Obama is still making his case for universal care - a topic on which doctors are still torn.

The President was very well received by the audience of doctors at the AMA in Chicago, but I think some of the country’s health care professionals are still wary of the changes that might be coming their way.

Have you ever had a doctor tell you that the potential outcome of whatever illness you’re suffering from is far worse than you expected or than it should be?

Take, for example, a friend of mine who recently dropped a cardboard box on her foot, got a paper cut from it, and found herself in the hospital the next day.

The cut got infected and swelled badly - causing the emergency room doctor to put my friend on antibiotics. The doctor also said that if the swelling didn’t go down and the infection didn’t subside, amputation might be necessary.

You can imagine my friend’s reaction - “Amputation from a paper cut?! You have to be kidding!” - and the doctor admitted that an outcome like that was incredibly unlikely. Okay, so then why did she even say it, and is she allowed to give drastic prognoses like that?

Legally, yes. There’s no way to know if the doctor truly believed that amputation would be necessary, but if the infection did get bad enough (it didn’t), amputation may have been a valid solution. That doesn’t make it right to say so, though.

Whether doctors scare patients on purpose remains to be seen - the situation and doctor in question vary, of course. But these scare tactics are not considered medical malpractice.

Sometimes doctors say things that scare patients without even realizing it - it’s like when you think out loud and other people hear you. You think it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you believe it. If this happens to you, say something to your doctor - ask them to clarify, and ask them why they said what they said.

If some kind of injury happens to you because of a procedure, shot, surgery or technique a doctor uses on you, don’t hesitate to get in touch with a personal injury lawyer and ask questions about medical malpractice.

Words aren’t enough to press any charges against a medical professional, but as in anything, actions speak louder than words. If you think you’re a victim of medical malpractice, ask a local personal injury lawyer.

A Kentucky man and his wife have sued the man’s doctor for amputating his penis without his authorization.

The doctor’s lawyer said the procedure was considered “medically necessary” and authorized by the patient because the patient gave the doctor permission to perform “any medical procedure deemed necessary”.

The 61-year-old man went in for a scheduled circumcision to treat inflammation. The lawsuit claims the doctor removed the man’s penis during the surgery without consulting the man or his wife.

The doctor’s lawyer said the penis amputation was authorized because the man had cancer and there was “no reasonable option other than to have the cancer removed”.

The man and his wife are seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages from the doctor, the doctor’s company and the anesthesiologist.

Related Articles:

• Man Sues Over Unneeded Testicle Removal
• Woman Sues For Unneeded Double Mastectomy

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among other news outlets, is reporting that the state of Illinois will reconsider its state law providing limitations on the non-economic damages awarded as part of medical malpractice jury verdicts.

Though the state has twice struck down medical malpractice laws, most recently in 1997, state lawmakers wrote a new law in 2005 that caps non-economic damages (money for things like "pain and suffering") to $500,000 for doctors and $1 million for hospitals.  However, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Diane Larsen ruled in favor of the mother of young Abigaile LeBron, who suffered extreme mental impairment and cerebral palsy as the result of injuries sustained during her birth, and in fact declared the medical malpractice caps unconstitutional, as statutory limits interfered with the duty of juries to award what they deemed appropriate verdicts.

This question of the separation of legislative and judicial powers will be at the heart of the Supreme Court’s decision this fall, and makes it fairly likely that the cap will be overturned once again, as the court previously ruled in favor of this separation both times it overturned malpractice caps.

There is no date set for the case to go to trial, but it could happen as early as next month, the Post-Dispatch reports.

Health Beat’s Maggie Mahar offers a well-documented take on medical malpractice issues, including some startling facts from a recent article from the New England Journal of Medicine written by the Harvard School of Public Health:

• “The great majority of patients who sustain a medical injury as a result of negligence do not sue.” Indeed, the New York Times reports, although “recent studies have found that one of every 100 hospital patients suffers negligent treatment, and that as many as 98,000 die each year as a result . . .  only a small fraction of injured patients — perhaps 2 percent—press legal claims.)
     
• “Just 1.1 percent of all doctors accounted for 30 percent of all malpractice payments made between 1990 and 2002, while only 5.2 percent of doctors were responsible for 55 percent of all payouts.”  A very small group of doctors are losing or settling malpractice lawsuits, but they are losing big.
     
• “Eighty percent of claims involved injuries that caused significant or major disability (39 percent and 15 percent, respectively) or death (26 percent).”

You can catch more on medical malpractice at Total Injury’s main site.